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Thursday, January 15, 2015

Best Of: How the Great Food War Will Be Won

By conventional wisdom it is excellent news. Researchers from Iowa have shown that organic farming methods can yield almost as highly as pesticide-intensive methods. Other researchers, from Berkeley, California, have reached a similar conclusion.
Indeed, both findings met with a very enthusiastic reception. The
enthusiasm is appropriate, but only if one misses a deep and fundamental
point: that even to participate in such a conversation is to fall into a
carefully laid trap.

The strategic centerpiece of Monsanto's PR,
and also that of just about every major commercial participant in the
industrialized food system, is to focus on the promotion of one single
overarching idea. The big idea that industrial producers in the food
system want you to believe is that only they can produce enough for the
future population (Peekhaus 2010). Thus non-industrial systems of farming, such as all those which use agro-ecological methods, or SRI, or are localized and family-oriented, or which use organic methods, or non-GMO seeds, cannot feed the world.

To be sure, agribusiness has other PR strategies. Agribusiness is
"pro-science," its opponents are "anti-science," and so on. But the main
plank has for decades been to create a cast-iron moral framing around
the need to produce more food (Stone and Glover 2011).

Likewise,
whenever these same organizations compose speeches or press releases,
or videos, or make any pronouncement designed for policymakers or the
populace, they devote precious space to the same urgent problem. It is
even in their job advertisements.
It is their Golden Fact and their universal calling card. And as far as
neutrals are concerned it wins the food system debate hands down,
because it says, if any other farming system cannot feed the world, it
is irrelevant. Only agribusiness can do that.

The Real Food Crisis is of Overproduction

Yet
this strategy has a disastrous foundational weakness. There is no
global or regional shortage of food. There never has been and nor is
there ever likely to be. India has a superabundance of food. South America is swamped in food. The US, Australia, New Zealand and Europe are swamped in food (e.g. Billen et al 2011). In Britain, like in many wealthy countries, nearly half of all row crop food production now goes to biofuels,
which at bottom are an attempt to dispose of surplus agricultural
products. China isn't quite swamped but it still exports food (see Fig
1.); and it grows 30% of the world's cotton. No foodpocalypse there either.

Of
all the populous nations, Bangladesh comes closest to not being swamped
in food. Its situation is complex. Its government says it is
self-sufficient. The UN world Food Program says it is not,
but the truth appears to be that Bangladeshi farmers do not produce the
rice they could because prices are too low, because of persistent gluts
(1).

Even some establishment institutions will occasionally admit that the
food shortage concept – now and in any reasonably conceivable future –
is bankrupt. According to experts consulted by the World Bank Institute
there is already sufficient food production for 14 billion people – more food than will ever be needed. The Golden Fact of agribusiness is a lie.

Truth Restoration

So,
if the agribusiness PR experts are correct that food crisis fears are
pivotal to their industry, then it follows that those who oppose the
industrialization of food and agriculture should make dismantling that
lie their top priority.

Anyone who wants a sustainable,
pesticide-free, or non-GMO food future, or who wants to swim in a
healthy river or lake again, or wants to avoid climate chaos, needs to
know all this. Anyone who would like to rebuild the rural economy or who
appreciates cultural, biological, or agricultural diversity of any
meaningful kind should take every possible opportunity to point out the
evidence that refutes it. Granaries are bulging, crops are being burned as biofuels or
dumped, prices are low, farmers are abandoning farming for slums and
cities, all because of massive oversupply. Anyone could also point out
that probably the least important criterion for growing food, is how
much it yields. Even just to acknowledge crop yield, as an issue for
anyone other than the individual farmer, is to reinforce the framing of
the industry they oppose.

The project to fully industrialize
global food production is far from complete, yet already it is
responsible for most deforestation, most marine pollution, most coral
reef destruction, much of greenhouse gas emissions, most habitat loss,
most of the degradation of streams and rivers, most food insecurity,
most immigration, most water depletion, massive human health problems,
and so on (Foley et al 2005; Foley et al 2011).
Therefore, it is not an exaggeration to say that if the
industrialization of food is not reversed our planet will be made
unlivable for multi-cellular organisms. Our planet is becoming literally uninhabitable solely
as a result of the social and ecological consequences of
industrializing agriculture. All these problems are without even
mentioning the trillions of dollars in annual externalized costs and subsidies (Pretty et al. 2000).

So,
if one were to devise a strategy for the food movement, it would be
this. The public already knows (mostly) that pesticides are dangerous.
They also know that organic food is higher quality, and is far more
environmentally friendly. It knows that GMOs should be labeled, are largely untested, and may be harmful. That is why the leaders of most major countries, including China,
dine on organic food. The immense scale of the problems created by
industrial agriculture should, of course, be understood better, but the
main facts are hardly in dispute.

But what industry understands, and the food movement does not, is that what prevents total rejection of bland, industrialized, pesticide-laden,
GMO food is the standard acceptance, especially in Western countries,
of the overarching agribusiness argument that such food is necessary. It
is necessary to feed the world.

But, if the food movement could
show that famine is an empty threat then it would also have shown, by
clear implication, that the chemical health risks and the ecological
devastation that these technologies represent are what is unnecessary.
The movement would have shown that pesticides and GMOs exist solely to
extract profit from the food chain. They have no other purpose.
Therefore, every project of the food movement should aim to spread the
truth of oversupply, until mention of the Golden Fact invites ridicule
and embarrassment rather than fear.

Divide and Confuse

Food
campaigners might also consider that a strategy to combat the food
scarcity myth can unite a potent mix of causes. Just as an understanding
of food abundance destroys the argument for pesticide use and GMOs
simultaneously, it also creates the potential for common ground within
and between constituencies that do not currently associate much: health
advocates, food system workers, climate campaigners, wildlife
conservationists and international development campaigners. None of
these constituencies inherently like chemical poisons, and they are
hardly natural allies of agribusiness, but the pressure of the food
crisis lie has driven many of them to ignore what could be the
best solution to their mutual problems: small scale farming and
pesticide-free agriculture. This is exactly what the companies intended.

So divisive has the Golden Fact been that some non-profits have entered into perverse partnerships with agribusiness and others support inadequate or positively fraudulent sustainability labels.
Another consequence has been mass confusion over the observation that
almost all the threats to the food supply (salinisation, water
depletion, soil erosion, climate change and chemical pollution) come
from the supposed solution–the industrialization of food production.
These contradictions are not real. When the smoke is blown away and the
mirrors are taken down the choices within the food system become crystal
clear. They fall broadly into two camps.

VEGETABLES GROWING. (CREDIT: SISTERS OF ST FRANCIS, OLDENBURG)

On the one side lie family farms and ecological methods. These support farmer and consumer health, resilience, financial and democratic independence,
community, cultural and biological diversity, and long term
sustainability. Opposing them is control of the food system by corporate
agribusiness. Agribusiness domination leads invariantly to dependence, uniformity, poisoning and ecological degradation, inequality, land grabbing, and, not so far off, to climate chaos.

One is a vision, the other is a nightmare: in every single case where
industrial agriculture is implemented it leaves landscapes
progressively emptier of life. Eventually, the soil turns either into mud that washes into the rivers or into dust that blows away on the wind. Industrial agriculture has no long term future; it
is ecological suicide. But for obvious reasons those who profit from it
cannot allow all this to become broadly understood. That is why the
food scarcity lie is so fundamental to them. They absolutely depend on
it, since it alone can camouflage the simplicity of the underlying
issues.

SOIL EROSION, USA, 1935

Reverse PR?

Despite all this, the food and environmental
movements have never seriously contested the reality of a food crisis.
Perhaps that is because it is a narrative with a long history. As early
as the 1940s the chemical and oil industries sent the Rockefeller
Foundation to Mexico to "fix" agriculture there. Despite evidence to the
contrary, the Rockefeller scientists derived a now-familiar narrative:
Mexican agriculture was obviously gripped by a production deficit that
could be fixed by "modern" agribusiness products (The Hungry World,
2010). This story later became the uncontested "truth" that legitimized
the green revolution and still propels the proliferation of pesticides,
fertilizers, GMOs and other agribusiness methods into every part of the
globe.

Yet in the age of the internet it is no longer necessary
to let an industry decide where the truth resides. It is possible to
restore reality to the global discussion about food so that all
potential production methods can have their merits fairly evaluated (IAASTD,
2007). Until this is done agribusiness and chemical industry solutions
will always be the default winner, alternative agriculture will always
be alternative, if it exists at all.

The evidence with which to
contradict the lie is everywhere; but in an unequal and unjust system
truth never speaks for itself. It is a specific task that requires a
refusal to be intimidated by the torrents of official misinformation and
a willingness to unembed oneself from the intellectual web of industry
thinking. (That will often mean ordinary people acting alone.)

The
task requires two things; the first is familiarity with the basic facts
of the food system. Good starting points (apart from the links in this
article) are Good Food for Everyone Forever by Colin Tudge or World Hunger: Twelve Myths by Joseph Collins, Peter Rosset and Frances Moore Lappe.

Power, Lies, and Consent

The
second requirement is a shift in perception. The shift is to move
beyond considering only physical goals, such as saving individual
species, or specific political achievements, and to move towards
considering the significance of the underlying mental state of the
citizenry.

Companies and industries pay huge sums of money for public relations
(PR). PR is predicated on the idea that all human behavior is governed
by belief systems. PR is therefore the discovery of the structure of
those belief systems, mainly through focus groups, and the subsequent
manipulation of those belief structures with respect to particular
products or other goals.

Thus human reasoning, which asks
questions like: Is it fair? What will the neighbors think? can be
accessed and diverted to make individuals and groups act often against
their own self-interests. Two important general rules are that it works
best when people don't know they are being influenced, and that it comes
best from a "friendly" source. PR is therefore always concealed which
creates the widespread misunderstanding that it is rare or ineffective.

Anyone
who desires social change on a significant scale should seek to
understand this, and its corollary, that the food crisis lie is far from
the only lie. As philosopher Michel Foucault documented for madness and also criminality, many assertions constituting
supposed "reality" are best understood as establishment fabrications.
Those described by Foucault mostly have deep historical roots; but
others, such as the genetic origin of disease, or the validity of animal experiments, are untruths of recent origin. The function of these fabrications is always social control. As Edward Bernays, the father of modern PR, long ago wrote:

"The
conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits
and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of
our country."

The possibility of manipulating habits and opinions, which he also called "the engineering of consent" was not an idle boast.

Foucault,
who was concerned mostly with the power held by governments, considered
that the fabrications he had identified were not conspiracies. They
were emergent properties of power. Power and knowledge grow together in
an intertwined and mutually supportive fashion. He argued that knowledge
creates power but is also deferential to power and so is deformed by
it. An example is when US newspapers decline to use the word "torture"
for when torture is used by the US government. These newspapers and the
US government are together doing what Foucault theorized. The US
government gets to torture and gains power in the process while the
public is simultaneously deceived and disempowered. In this way the
preferred language of the powerful has historically and continuously
evolved into the established public truth, to the disadvantage of the
people.

Bernays, however, worked mainly for corporations. He knew,
since some of them were his own ideas, that many of the more recent
fabrications were not emergent properties but were intentionally
planted.

The essential point, however, is to appreciate not only
that companies and others deliberately engineer social change; but also
that when they do so it begins with the reordering of the "reality"
perceived by the people. The companies first create a reality (such as
Mexican hunger) for which their desired change seems to the people
either obvious, or beneficial, or natural. When it comes, the people
therefore do not resist the solution, many welcome it.

The Structure of "Reality"

Dictators
and revolutionaries provide an interesting lesson in this. The
successful ones have achieved sometimes extraordinary power. As always,
they have done so first by changing the opinions of the people. The
dictator, like any corporation, must make the people want them. As a
general rule, dictators do this by creating new and more compelling
false realities on top of older ones.

Hitler, to take a familiar
example, harnessed a newly synthesized idea (German nationalism) to a
baseless scientific theory (of racial genetics) and welded this to
pre-existing "realities" of elitism and impugned manhood (the loss of
WWI). These ideas were instrumental in his rise to power. But the
important lesson for social change is that none of the ideas used by him
possessed (now or then) any objective or empirical reality. They were
all fabrications. It is true Hitler also had secret money, bodyguards,
and so on, but so did others. Only Hitler found the appropriate
combination of concepts able to colonize the minds of enough German
people.

But Hitler is not known now for being just another leader
of Germany. He is infamous for two events, the holocaust and World War
II. The same lessons apply. Millions fought and died for almost a decade
in a struggle to assert ideas that could have been destroyed by the
intellectual equivalent of a feather. But that is how powerful ideas
are.

The lies told in more democratic societies are not so very
different to those used by Hitler in the sense that the important ones
have predictable properties that can be categorized and sorted. What the
food scarcity lie has in common with Hitler's use of race, and with
myths of nationalism, or of modern terrorism, and many others, is the
creation of a threat, in this case of famine and possible social
breakdown. The creation of an internal or external threat is thus the
first category of lies.

The second category recognizes the
necessity of "efficient government." No government can issue direct and
separate orders to all the people all the time. Nor can it possess the
resources for physical enforcement of those orders. It must therefore
find ways to cause the people to govern, order, and regiment themselves,
in exquisite detail. Therefore, governments supply and support guiding
principles in the form of artificial unifying aspirations, such as
"progress" or "civilization." Typically, they also strongly encourage
the desirability of being "normal;" and especially they reinforce
elitism (follow the leader), and so on.

Another structural
category follows from the recognition that the effective operation of
power over others, unless it is based on pure physical force or
intimidation, usually requires an authoritative source of ostensibly
unbiased knowledge. The population must be "convinced" by an
unimpeachable third party. This function is typically fulfilled by
either organized religion or by organized science. Scientific or
religious institutions thus legitimate the ideas (progress, hierarchy,
normality, inequality, etc.) of the rulers. These sources conceal the
use of power because they combine the appearance of authority,
independence and disinterestedness. These qualities are all or partly fictions.

Another
category are fabrications intended to foster dependence on the state
and the formal economy. These aim to undermine the ancient dependence of
individuals on the land and each other, and transfer that dependence to
the state. Thus the worship of competition, the exaggeration of gender differences, and genetic determinism (the
theory that your health, personality, and success derive only from
within) are examples of fabrications that sow enmity and isolation among
the population.

Another important category, which include the
myths of papal infallibility, or scientific and journalistic
objectivity, exist to reinforce the power of authority itself. These
fabrications act to bolster the influence of other myths.

The
above list is not exhaustive, but it serves to introduce the idea that
the organizing of detailed control over populations of millions,
achieved mostly without resorting to any physical force, requires the
establishing and perpetual reinforcement of multiple interlocking
untruths. This itself has important implications.

The first and
most important implication is that if the lies and fabrications exist to
concentrate and exercise power over others (and then conceal its use),
then it also follows that genuinely beneficial and humanitarian goals
such as harmony, justice, and equity, require retrieval of the truth and
the goals will follow naturally from that retrieval.

The task of
anyone who wants harmony, justice, peace, etc to prevail therefore
becomes primarily to free the people from believing in lies and thus
allowing them to attain mastery over their own minds. At that point they
will know their own true needs and desires; they will no longer "want"
to be oppressed or exploited.

The second implication of this
entwining of knowledge with power is that, when properly understood,
goals of harmony, understanding, health, diversity, justice,
sustainability, opportunity, etc., are not contradictory or mutually
exclusive. Rather, they are necessarily interconnected.

The third implication is that an empire built on lies is much more vulnerable than it seems. It can rapidly unravel.

Given
that resources are limited, the problems of achieving broad social
justice, of providing for the people, and of restoring environmental
harms consequently become that of discerning which of the lies (since
there are many) are most in need of exposing; and perhaps in what order.

Conclusion

Thus
the necessary shift in perception is to see that, as in most wars, the
crucial struggle in the food war is the one inside people's heads. And
that the great food war will be won by the side that understands that
and uses it best.

This food war can be won by either side. The
natural advantages of the grassroots in this realm are many. They
include the power of the internet–which represents a historic
opportunity to connect with others; second, that it takes a lot less
effort to assert the truth than it does to build a lie-many people only
need to hear the truth once; and thirdly, that in this particular battle
the non-profit public-interest side doesn't necessarily need a bigger
megaphone because, unlike the industry, they are (broadly) trusted by
the public.
Consequently, it is perfectly possible that a lie that
took several powerful industries many decades to build up could be
dismantled in months. It is necessary only to unleash the power of the
truth and to constantly remember the hidden power of the people: that
all the effort industries put into misleading them is an accurate
acknowledgement of the potential of that power.

But by combining these
arguments with a refutation of the food crisis they can help destroy
the industrial model of agriculture forever. And when that happens many
of our worst global problems, from climate change and rainforest
destruction down, will become either manageable or even negligible.
It is all in the mind.

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